On Friday June 29 a U.S. Navy carrier strike group set sail from Puget Sound to participate in “Rim of the Pacific” maneuvers. More than 20 nations are involved in the six-week maneuvers, which featured a key difference for the American fleet. The carriers had filled up on biofuel at a cost of nearly $27 a gallon, more than seven times as high as the usual $3.60 a gallon of conventional fuel. The massive cost increase is the result of President Obama linking the national security of the United States to his own environmental agenda.

As the politically correct line has it, conventional fuel is scarce, environmentally destructive, and has to be procured from dangerous areas of the world. Therefore, biofuels made domestically from seeds, algae, chicken fat and such will enhance the security of the military and the nation itself. A great deal more than security is in play here. Consider, for example, the source of the biofuels.

T.J. Glauthier, a board member of Solazyme Inc., was deputy Secretary and Chief Operating Officer of the Department of Energy from 1999-2001. Then he served on Barack Obama’s White House transition team, working specifically on energy provisions in the president’s stimulus package. Conveniently enough, Solazyme received a stimulus grant of $21.8 million to build a refinery for biofuels.

According to a Reuters report, in 2009 the Pentagon paid Solazyme $8.5 million for 20,055 gallons of algae-based biofuel, which works out to $424 a gallon. Last year the order was 450,000 gallons, the biggest-ever biofuel order from government, at a cost of $12 million, which works out to more than $26 a gallon. Blended with conventional fuels, the cost is supposed to be $15 a gallon but under no scenario is the cost of biofuels less than twice as much as conventional fuel. Even so, the plan is 50 percent biofuels for the Navy by 2016. But some analysts see a problem on the practical side.